To Bring Virtual Reality to Market, Furious Efforts to Solve Nausea

Virtual reality headsets from companies like Sony, pictured, and Oculus VR had to overcome the threat of making users physically ill.Credit
Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — Few technologies have generated more attention than virtual reality, which promises to immerse people in 3-D games and video.

Yet for the last couple of years, the companies building virtual reality headsets have begged for patience from content creators and the public. The companies’ biggest concern: that unpolished virtual reality products could make people physically sick.

The public’s wait for virtual reality is nearing an end. In recent days, several of the most prominent companies making headsets offered rough timetables for consumer versions of their products, ending the guessing game about when virtual reality would get its first real test.

The most closely watched of those companies, Oculus VR, which is owned by Facebook, said it expected to begin widely selling a product before the end of the year. Oculus has teamed up with Samsung on the product, a headset that uses a mobile phone as a screen.

“We’re going to hang ourselves out there and be judged,” John Carmack, chief technology officer of Oculus, said on Wednesday in a speech at the Game Developers Conference here, where virtual reality was the talk of the show.

Sony said this week that it planned to ship its own virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4 console, known as Project Morpheus, during the first half of next year. And Valve, an influential game maker and online game retailer, said HTC would start selling a virtual reality headset designed by the two companies before the end of this year. The device will be called Vive.

In his frank speech at the conference, Mr. Carmack did not sugarcoat his explanation for why Oculus has moved slowly to ship a public version of its virtual reality technology. It is well known that virtual reality headsets can cause motion sickness and eyestrain in people who use them, though the severity varies by person, the type of game being played and the length of time a game is played.

Oculus and other companies are still making technical modifications to their products to avoid those effects. They are encouraging game developers to avoid creating virtual environments that tend to cause nausea, like roller coaster rides. Mr. Carmack said Oculus would still allow virtual reality games that could make people uncomfortable into the online store for its headset, but it will label them as such.

In the meantime, they are keeping access to the products limited. Oculus has released a version of its headset that connects to PCs for developers only. Gear VR, the mobile phone headset Samsung makes, has been on sale since late last year, but only in limited quantities and without broad distribution in wireless stores and other retail locations.

Photo

Oculus says it will begin shipping its products, shown here, this year, and Sony says it will do so next year.Credit
Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

In explaining why Oculus has gone slow, Mr. Carmack described what he called a “nightmare scenario” that has worried him and other Oculus executives. “People like the demo, they take it home, and they start throwing up,” he said.

“The fear is if a really bad V.R. product comes out, it could send the industry back to the ’90s,” he said.

In that era, virtual reality headsets flopped, disappointing investors and consumers. “It left a huge, smoking crater in the landscape,” said Mr. Carmack, who is considered an important game designer for his work on Doom and Quake. “We’ve had people afraid to touch V.R. for 20 years.”

Some longtime game industry executives say the excitement around virtual reality could easily dissipate. “The challenge is there is so much expectation and anticipation that that could fall away quite quickly if you don’t get the type of traction you had hoped,” said Neil Young, chief executive of N3twork, a mobile games start-up.

At least one company, Valve, believes it has solved the discomfort problem with headsets. In an interview at the developer conference, Gabe Newell, the president and co-founder of Valve, said he, too, had reacted badly to most headset demonstrations, describing them as the “world’s best motion sickness inducers.”

Mr. Newell said the company had worked hard on its virtual reality technology to eliminate the discomfort, saying that “zero percent of people get motion sick” when they try its system. Part of its solution is a motion tracking system that uses lasers to accurately reproduce a person’s real-world movements in the virtual world. Mr. Newell said Valve would offer the tracking system, called Lighthouse, free to hardware manufacturers.

During a 15-minute demonstration of the Valve headset, it caused no discomfort for a reporter. In one segment of the demonstration, a colossal whale comes precariously close to the viewer, who is standing on the prow of a wrecked ship.

Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, a game publisher, said the development of virtual reality technology was accelerating. He compared the industry’s stage of development to the time of the iPhone’s release. Many consumers did not see the usefulness of the device at first, but early adopters flocked to it, and eventually, it transformed how people thought about their phones.

He said the initial market for virtual reality gear would be the many millions of people who have bought Xbox and PlayStation game consoles. But there are many other uses, from virtual tours of buildings to immersive films. Epic showed off a demo at the conference, created with Weta Digital, that puts the viewer in a scene from the movie “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.”

“It’s going to be a little bit rocky,” Mr. Sweeney said about the development of virtual reality. “Some people are going to ship products that won’t be good. But there is so much momentum behind this that V.R. is an inevitability.”

Correction: March 6, 2015

An article on Thursday about virtual-reality companies’ efforts to resolve motion sickness problems before putting products on the shelf misstated Google’s role in a funding round for Magic Leap, a company developing an augmented reality headset. It was the lead investor, not the only one.

Vindu Goel contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on March 5, 2015, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Solution to Nausea Puts Virtual Reality Closer to Market. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe